After Taiwan managed to contain the COVID-19 pandemic for more than a year, a surge in locally transmitted cases began in the middle of last month. Most people seem to believe that the best solution is to quickly vaccinate everyone to achieve herd immunity as soon as possible. The vaccine issue is an incendiary matter, and the advances made in developing a Taiwan-produced vaccine has caused much controversy. At the end of the 20th century, the hepatitis B virus (HBV) was rampant in Taiwan. When I started teaching at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University in the early 1980s, when the school